September 2011

September 14, 2011

I.That ambivalent, oblique, laconic way of speaking, it’s very self-defensive, but it thinks of itself as very up-front.

A really charming guy last night, one of the musicians, said to me ‘Hey, man, you got a really interesting voice.’ You know, I was very charmed. And he said, ‘Yeah, the way you really push it out there--you can hear every beat.’ [laughs.]

That’s terrific. That’s the way I feel it.

These words, taken from an interview with Anne Waldman in Ron Mann’s 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, come from the most laconic of 20th century laconic American poets, Robert Creeley.

Creeley’s sound-driven poetry is in a sense halfway between Cage’s silence and, say, Michael McLure’s shaman-fire. As a twentysomething wanna-be poet commuting to Rutgers University’s Camden satellite campus, I first saw the film on a VHS tape rented from TLA Video in Philadelphia. The documentary was 4-5 years old by then, and I rented it on countless occasions, accumulating some serious late fees. Sometimes, I took the train across the Delaware River for the sole reason of hearing the clip where John Giorno yelps his poems over a prerecorded track or Jayne Sanchez duels with Jamaaleen Tacuma’s bass.

The documentary’s angle or thesis was that poetry, as a heard form, can be freed from the academy’s grip, which according to several of the featured poets, is “so hard to understand.” As someone forced to read Pound and Eliot at a premature point of my writing life, I agreed with these assertions wholeheartedly. Watching the film again, I also recall feeling that I was somehow more hip than the academics.

Creeley, a poet in academia almost all of his writing life, at first seemed staid and laid-back to me, certainly not as viscerally satisfying as the poets reading with the bells and whistles, like Ed Sanders of the Fugs, for instance, with his "musical tie." Creeley’s comments that immediately follow his reading of “Self-Portrait,” however, have always helped me appreciate the poem. On the surface, the speaker does seem rather coy, “laconic,” and “oblique” in his meaning and intention. Over the years, I grew to like the poem more and more as my ear changed; Creeley’s pauses in his performance and line, after tens of listenings, I learned, provided a perfect form for the sound and meaning contents of the poem. It indicated deeper ambiguities. Here's the poem:

Self-Portrait

He wants to be a brutal old man an aggressive old man, as dull, as brutal as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise, nor to be ever nice to anyone. Just mean, and final in his brutal, his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet, the gentle, the “oh let’s hold hands together” and it was awful, dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on his own two dwindling legs. His arms, his skin, shrink daily. And he loves, but hates equally.

September 12, 2011

If you do a "close" reading of the P&W methodology section you will see what shifting sand the ranking is based on (background on rankings is here). Most of what is in the methodology section would be more accurately placed in a separate section called "findings." This distinction is important because by keeping the findings separate from the discussion of methodology the reader knows that the findings are just one person's interpretation of the data.

Most of the statistics derive from a single number, 640, the number of would-be applicants who visited a blog and responded to a poll by completing forms. Most of what the author says are "demographics" are poll responses. The author does not provide demographics (such as age, gender, location, income, etc of the respondents).

The methodology says the responses are "votes" and that those programs receiving the most "votes" are the ones the respondents hold in highest esteem. Yet if you read elsewhere you learn that the "votes" are the programs to which respondents are applying; there may be no connection between which program one might hold in high esteem and those to which one individual is applying (eg. I may think Houston is the best but because I live and work and have family in NYC, it isn't practical for me so it's not on my list of programs I'll be applying to. I may believe that Cornell has the best program yet I know the liklihood of getting in is slim so I'm not applying- these scenarios aren't captured in the ranking). Respondents were not asked to reveal which programs they hold in highest esteem; they were asked to disclose to which programs they would apply.

Every time the author says, "it is reasonable to assume," know that it is also reasonable to assume something other that what follows. Such claims are not backed up with any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.

Most of the programs ranked got fewer than half the number of "votes" than the top ranked program - there are many many ways to account for this gap and yet the only explanation given is that it reflects the "esteem" with which potential applicants hold the program but it could reflect many other possibilities.

A good deal of the "methodology" section is devoted to history of MFAs and to discrediting other polls - irrelevant in a discussion of methodology.

I could go on. The infelicities of the writing style are too numerous to mention. Strip away all of this filler and you see how little substance there is to the ranking.

And there is more: The author of the ranking methodology makes many unsupported claims. None of these claims have anything to do with the method used to gather data for the so-called ranking. Here are but three examples from among many (my comments in bold):

When programs are assessed by individuals already within the system, the natural result is that older programs—whatever their selectivity, financial resources, faculty resources, curriculum, pedagogy, or student outcomes—move to the top of the pack due to their profile advantage. Yet applicants report only limited interest in programs’ historical pedigrees, as pedigree itself is often considered a suspect quantity in the national literary arts community." (What is the basis for a sweeping statement about the national literary arts community's views of "pedigree"?)

Whereas scientific rankings (which require demographic data that is, in this case, unavailable both to independent researchers and national trade organizations) traditionally poll, at the state level, well less than a hundredth of one percent of their target population, and national polls typically sample well less than a thousandth of one percent, the sample size for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings, in a nod to the necessarily unscientific nature of the polling, is between 2,000 and 20,000 times larger as a percentage of population. (Scientific polls use precise measures to identify and calculate sample size, which is why they don't have to rely on large numbers to get valid, replicable results. The sample here is unreliable because the pollster has no control over who has responded to the poll and because the pollster has known biases.)

In most instances, student scores are only lightly scrutinized (or simply ignored altogether) by the programs themselves, and instead reviewed—where they are reviewed—by individual universities’ Graduate Colleges, which often have minimum GRE-score requirements (typically very generous ones). Creative writing MFA applicants should not avoid the GRE General Test for fear of the Mathematics portion of the exam; even those programs that do give minor weight to standardized test scores in their admissions processes generally look only at applicants’ Verbal and Analytical Writing scores. (How does P&W know that applicants fear the mathematics portion of the GRE and how admissions offices value them?)

These inaccuracies, sweeping statements, and blatant falsehoods are buried in the excess verbiage that is characteristic of the author's writing. Strip the garbage away and you're left with . . . garbage.

Hey there. Daniel Nester here. I've guest-blogged before in this space, so I'll cut to the quick and start posting things. If you want to know more about me and whatnot, check out where I live online as well as my usual blogging space, the group blog We Who Are About To Die.

I'll start off with a scan of W.H. Auden's "daydream College for Bards," from his essay "The Poet and The City" collected in The Dyer's Hand. I love bringing this up when, as the seasons seem to dictate, people start talking about the utility of graduate, and even undergraduate, writing classes.

I think I first encountered the Auden quote reading Clayton Eshelman's piece in the collection of poetry/prosody, Conversant Essays, in a class given by Mark Rudman. David Lehman mentions the Auden Daydream College in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Best American Poetry.

Writing in 1991, Erica Riggs addresses Auden's Item #5, the bit about cultivating a garden plot. Good ole Wystan stipulates this, Riggs writes, "perhaps to teach them how a crop is brought to "'ripeness.'"

Riggs continues to say that "a gardener can do much, using experience and judgment to produce asuccessful crop, just as a poet may bring critical judgment to bear on the composition of poetry. But the crucial processes of germination and fructification draw energy from earth and sun in their seasonal cycle--vast powers that he can only hope to engage by being humbly responsive to them."

I'll leave this this kicker-quote, also found in the Riggs. "I am always interested," Auden writes, "in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete, and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis."

September 11, 2011

You’re not getting an MFA to get funded by an MFA program, nor to have a good teaching load, nor to move somewhere with an ideal cost of living. You’re getting an MFA to have your writing taken seriously by serious writers who you respect. There’s no way of knowing ahead of time if someone is going to be a great teacher and especially not if they’re going to be a great teacher for you. But I swear that anyone who tries to tell you teachers are not the most important part of an MFA program has been spending too much time on the internet. Don’t buy it. Put the rankings down.

Pick up the books of the faculty. Pick up the books of the alumni. Try to talk to people who actually go to these programs. They aren’t the ones voting in these rankings. But they are people who can tell you if a young faculty member is bright and full of energy or bewildered and doesn’t know how to handle graduate students. They can tell you if the Pulitzer winner is never going to learn your name or is going to keep meeting with you four years after you graduate. Read about the programs. Don’t go into debt—or do—but make your decision about your writing and the writers you want to work with first, and money after. Don’t buy these rankings. I mean really, don’t buy the actual rankings. Tell your friends not to too and hopefully, someday soon, Poets & Writers will stop printing them.

Editors Moira Egan and Clarinda Harriss are among the talented poets who feel that cleverness and wit can flourish within the confines of fourteen lines, rhymed or not. They have figured out a beautiful way to prove the point in their hot-off-the-press anthology, Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press).

They have also effortlessly proved a second proposition: that American poets are writing about sex and romance with passion, intimacy, candor, control, and sensuality. A sonnet can owe some of its effects to popular song lyrics, as in the wonderful opening of Sharon Dolin's "Now That I Have Lain With You":

Now that I have lain with youYou know I can be claimed by you.

Your hazel eyes, the way you linger-kiss:I long to feel the stamen of you.

There are surprises aplenty here. One of H. L. Hix's sonnets has this arresting opening:

The man with the crooked dick shines his shoes.The woman with one arm takes off her brassiere.

Turn the page and the same characters recur in different poses: "The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. / The woman with one arm breaks into flame."

There are two sonnet crowns: Kathrine Varnes's "Fleshpot Sonnets" and Marilyn Taylor's "The Seven Very Liberal Arts." In a crown the last line of one sonnet recurs, in the same or somewhat altered form, as line one of the next sonnet, Taylor enjoys transmuting "your Freddie Mac against my Fannie Mae" into "Frederic Chopin, Fannie Mendelssohn.,"

The twin subjects of Varnes's gaze throughout her seven sonnets are peaches and bras, including padded bras and J. Alfred Prufrock's hesitation before eating a peach:

Let breasts be breasts. Our season's brief as is.It's hard enough to find a bra that fits.(And those who asked the schoolyard, Does she stuff?now look askance -- filled with J. Alfred's feara thousand times repeating: Do I dare?)Declare this moment and this peace enough.

Prufrock turns up again in Wendy Videlock's "Prufrock Takes a Formal Lover."

There are wonderful things here by Kim Addonizio, Molly Peacock, Terri Witek, Susan McLean, Amy Lemmon, Jo Ann Clark, Jenny Factor, A. E. Stallings, Tony Barnstone, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Sandra Beasley, the late Tim Dlugos, and the editors themselves. Your interest never flags. If it is true that many more women than men are represented here, it must also be remembered that the unquestioined muse of the sexy sonnet was a woman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and that, for whatever combination of reasons, a striking fact about recent American poetry is the fervor and intelligence with which women have written about the body, the erotic impulse, and its inevitable consequences. -- DL

This week we welocme Daniel Nester as our guest blogger. Daniel is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. His first two books, God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Salon.com, The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, and Bookslut, and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. He edits the group culture-slash-literature blog We Who Are About To Die <wewhoareabouttodie.com. Find him online here.

In other news . . .

Save the Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011 - The Best American Poetry 2011 Launch Reading. 7 PM, Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street, NYC) Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Kevin Young will be joined by John Ashbery, Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer L. Knox,Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, and Lee Upton.

September 09, 2011

My favourite film is Lenny, a movie directed by Luke Bassoon and starring Natalie Portal (right) as Madonna, a teenaged girl who is a hit-man (or hit-girl) and she employs an illiterate guy called Lenny to look after her while she moves around New York from hotel to hotel looking for a good place to live and to shoot people from the window. It ends with a corrupt policeman called something or other exploding because Lenny gave him a gift from Madonna, which was a bummer.

I don’t like movies much because they too often disappoint me. I can like them for about an hour or so, but usually when you get into the last half hour it's pretty obvious what's going to happen. And it usually does. I saw Cowboys & Aliens a little while ago. It was a little tricky because it was an illegal cam-copy streaming from the internet and the daylight scenes took place in darkness and the night scenes, of which there were many, I have no idea what was happening. Also sometimes somebody got up out of their seat in front of the camera to go to the toilet or somewhere. But it didn’t make much difference, because the film is rubbish, even by the movie industry's low standards.

But some movies I can watch over and over again, especially if they star Bugs Bunny or that other great actor, Laurence Oblivion. I watched him in Hamlet the other day. It's really good; you wouldn’t think a cartoon rabbit could pull off that kind of thing, but he did.

[N.B. Some of the above may contain errors.]

I love music. At the moment while I'm writing this I'm listening to a new record by a band called Cymbals Eat Guitars. It's not great but it's okay. My other new record this week is by I Break Horses, which I like much more. I also like their name, because it mentions horses, although I think they stole the name from the title of a song by someone else, which is acceptable because artistic theft shows initiative. If you listen to a record by Kanye West, half the time you're listening to someone else. But it's good. At least he steals good stuff.

(Oh, my legal team just told me that what Kanye West does isn’t theft, it's sampling, and he gets permission to use those things. Yeah, okay.)

Because I'm about a hundred years old a lot of people are surprised I'm so up-to-date with new music, especially seeing as how I live in a developing country where most kids only know Westlife and Lady Gaga but not much else. They think I would still be listening to The Everly Brothers or The Beatles, if they'd ever heard of them. (Some of them have heard of The Beatles: I remember one boy telling a class during a presentation how John Lennon quit the band when he got shot.) Well, I do listen to that old stuff sometimes, because it's great – one day last week I had a complete day of Otis Redding, which was amazing – but I like to try and keep up, even if it's an impossible task. You only have to look and see how much music is out there, and how many new records are released every week, to see how impossible it is. Even the guys at the cutting edge are often behind the times.

I'm trying to remember what I intended to write about today before I found myself thinking about films and music….

Oh yeah:

This morning I began a re-reading of the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, because I'm something of a child, and in the preface Charles Lamb says this:

It was no easy matter to give the histories of men and women in terms familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind. For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister's ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken….

Yeah, I was going to write about the good old days, when boys would (or even could) read to their sisters, selecting only what was proper for their ears. But then I realized it was probably a bad idea: a minefield, to put it mildly. And anyway, I have no idea what I was going to say.

But what I would like to say is it's been an honour writing here, and I hope some of you have enjoyed some of it. I would also like to leave with a song, from a record I've been playing a lot over the last few months. This is The Rural Alberta Advantage, and a song from their album Departing. (right click to open).

Once again, Poets and Writers Magazine has published creative writing MFA/Phd program rankings that are based on a poll of would-be applicants to such programs who visit a blog. Clearly P&W doesn't let its ethics get in the way of perpetuating a scam to boost circulation. After three years of seeing these rankings gain traction, nearly 200 MFA/Phd-program teachers and administrators, led by Robert Pinsky, Leslie Epstein, and Erin Belieu, have lodged a protest, in the form of an open letter (reproduced here by Dan Nester) to P&W that cites many of the same reasons for objecting to the rankings that we have noted here, here, and here since they were first published in 2009.

Here are a few of my thoughts on this mess:

Poets & Writers has entrusted the task of the rankings to a blogger/poet who has no credentials as a research scientist and who is not disinterested in the outcome: For each year of the rankings he has been enrolled in one of the programs that is being ranked. This fact alone should disqualify him for the job.

In attempting to shore up its phony methodology, P&W wastes a lot of ink on why other rankings fall short. This is like saying my poem is good because yours is bad.

P&W is wrong to assert that a scientific ranking of MFA programs is not possible. A ranking is possible, though to construct it properly would require time, money, and commitment, resources that might be better spent elsewhere. The underlying data, if collected by a reputable research firm, under the auspices of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and with the cooperation of its members, could establish a ranking that would give MFA/Phd applicants valuable information to guide their decisions about graduate programs.

Many of the signatories to the open letter are affiliated with our most prestigious universities. To lend more depth and credibility to their criticism, they should ask a member of a social science research department to review the ranking methodology and comment on its soundness. A first-year graduate student could do this in an afternoon; the outcome would underscore the extent to which P& W is flouting its responsibility to its readers.

The MFA programs should immediately pull their advertisements from P&W. Why continue to support a publication that is so lacking in journalistic integrity?

September 08, 2011

But a while ago, having at that point been living and working in China three years, I sort of instinctively felt that part of what I should be doing (as if I ever know what I’m doing) had to be to tackle some of the classical Chinese poetry. Not reading it, because I’d done a bunch of that and it’s easy enough to do (in translation), but involving oneself at a different level, by which I mean trying my hand at translation. And it’s a poet kind of thing to do (isn’t it?) because it fills the gaps when you aren’t writing poems of your own.

I was learning Chinese – I still am, in a limited way, and it’s not at all easy. But at that point I knew enough of how the language worked, and had at least a decent amount of experience in China and of the culture, to feel that having a crack at the poems in the original wouldn’t be a total waste of time. I’d always figured (and this is in no way an original insight) the big and obvious problem with translation was the inability of the translator to convey the cultural aspect of the poem: that is, the associations and allusions that are almost always going to be beyond the foreigner at the deepest, most significant level. From the ancient Chinese that comes with bells on, to coin a phrase. Even the Chinese teachers and students I spoke to acknowledged that they don’t get some of the stuff in those old poems: the allusions and associations are lost except to a few scholars, and the smartest of readers often has simply to shrug and say they know the poem is great but that line, no, sorry, I don’t have a clue what it means, and even when it's explained they still don’t really get it because the deeper meanings simply don’t mean or resonate now in the way they once did. Add to all this the inevitable loss of the sound and tone and music of the poem – and Chinese is a tonal language – and it may seem like a lost cause. But it isn't.

The first poems I translated were by Li Bai, (right) and I had the assistance of one of my Chinese student friends, and a couple of Chinese websites that explicated some of the more abstruse points of the poetry for us. Then, for reasons that don’t matter here, I kind of let things drift, and did no translations for quite a long time. But in late 2010 I got back into it, armed with a knowledge of the language somewhat better than before. I still needed help with some of the more obscure parts of the poems, and the finer points of language in the originals are often beyond dictionaries, but one can only hope that the results would at least be acceptable to the guys who wrote the things in the first place. I know one should probably get very academic and technical about all this, but it occurred to me that in layman's terms it was also very important that one should come up with a poem that, if it were possible, the bloke who wrote the original would think was okay – that you could, for example, sit down with Li Bai over a glass of wine and talk it through and you'd both understand what you were about as poets, and that you'd come close. And those guys liked their wine, too, which might help…..

My version of the much translated Li Bai poem, Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Alone among the flowers drinking wine I raise my cup and invite the bright moon come drink with me; my shadow would make three. But the moon's no drinker, and my shadow, it just follows me like a shadow does. Though we are only together like this for a while, it should be enjoyed, like youth. The moonlight moves along in time with me; we dance and it gets a little crazy. Sober we're happy; drunk I have lost you. If only our friendships were as constant as the River of Stars is unchanging.

doesn't do much that's different from many earlier versions other than use an English I feel comfortable with, which is slightly different from the English of, for example, an American poet translating the poem 60 or more years ago.

One of my favourite little poems is Red Beans (sometimes called "One Hearted", which sounds un-English to my ear)by Wáng Wéi (right). My version is very different from some I've seen:

The red bean grows in the south country. In Autumn its branches are filled with pods. Gather as many as you can and think of me thinking of you reaping the red bean harvest.

and those last two characters – the word 相思 (xiāng sī) – have (or has) two meanings: it's a colloquial name for red beans, but literally it means "to be thinking of each other". I think that's so cool.

* A selection of my translations of the poems of Li Bai, together with an earlier version of this essay, will be published inStaple 74.

David and I were in Atlanta, Georgia over Labor Day weekend and while there we stopped by the Woodruff Library at Emory University to take in this stunning exhibit curated by Kevin Young, who made the selections for the just-published 2011 volume of the Best American Poetry. On Sunday, Kevin, David, and contributor Natasha Trethewey read from the book at the Decatur-AJC Book Festival, a joyous affair. Prior to the session, Kevin took some time to talk to us about the exhibit, which is worth a special trip to the Emory campus. Of Harry and Caresse Crosby's Black Sun Press and its importance to the international avant-garde in post-WWI literary life, Young notes that the Paris-based press published "many of the key figures of modernism, often championing authors that others refused to print – from D.H. Lawrence to James Joyce. Perhaps Black Sun’s most famous book remains the first edition of Hart Crane’s long poem, The Bridge, which included the first photographs by Walker Evans to appear in book form. The Black Sun Press roster is a testament not only to the Crosbys’ good taste, but their bravery in the face of censorship and worse, achieving a rare mix of high-quality writing and sophisticated, luxe printing" When you tour the exhibit, you experience the pleasure of reading handwritten letters by a whole roster of great authors; Harry Crosby himself annotated copies of his books with his own hieroglyphic code You leave the exhibit with a renewed appreciation of this singular character, so rich and so representative a figure of the "lost generation" of expatriate artists in Paris in the 1920s. There is also an engrossing documentary about Caresse Crosby, a rare beauty, born a Boston Brahmin, who survived her recklessly handsome volatile husband.and went on, many years later, to buy a castle in Italy and turn it into an artist colony. The exhibit will remain on view through March, 2012.

September 07, 2011

I'm sure you're not interested in my health, but I've been troubled for the past couple of months by the remnants of a cold, remnants that consist of what I took to be a minor infection on my chest. My nights have been troubled by a cough, and my days by the unpleasantness of slightly congested sinuses. I don't like to use the word "phlegm" because it's disgusting. Anyway, a few days ago I eventually got fed up with it, and decided to go see a doctor. We have a clinic on campus, which is good for minor ailments, but my friend Zhang Yan told me she thought they weren't up to potentially life-threatening pulmonary diseases unless I wanted to get one (she has a sense of humour) and offered to accompany me to the big hospital downtown where, she said, a friend of hers is a doctor. Friends are very important here: they're often another way of saying "shortcut".

Zhong Da Wu Yuan, (No.5 Hospital), Zhuhai I should mention, in case you're wondering, that while Chinese hospitals and dentists can look more life-threatening than any disease or problem you might actually have, the opposite is the case, although I also have to say that the only photograph I've been able to find of this particular hospital does make it look pretty unappetizing. But I've had minor medical treatment in China and it's been fine, and I've also had extensive and highly effective (and painless) dental work at a fraction of the cost of similar treatment in England. I have no complaints at all, only praise. The dental adventures also came with the added amusement of people wandering in off the street to have a look around. One old guy came in and after taking a look inside my mouth sat down next to me and read his newspaper. He gave me the impression he thought I was in his chair. I don't have a photo of that particular dentist's, but the picture here gives you some idea: it's on the street, and very open to anyone who fancies wandering in. There's none of that hygiene nonsense….. But back to the hospital. This being China, and the doctor being Zhang Yan's friend, there was no question of going to out-patients' and waiting around for hours. Oh no. We went straight into in-patients', up to the doctors' room where a dozen or so doctors were sat around chatting – it was their lounge, I think – and I was examined in there. From behind his surgical mask the doctor said I had no serious problem, but he sent me for an x-ray anyway, presumably to check everything was where it should be.

We were told we'd need to wait for an hour while the photos were developed. Waiting at the same time were three policemen keeping company with someone who I think it'd accurate to describe as a criminal prisoner. One could tell he was that because he was shackled hand and foot like those guys you see in the movies shuffling towards somewhere dismal. He was wearing just a t-shirt, shorts and sandals, this being August in the tropics, and the "quaint" part was that he had newspaper stuffed down inside the shackles that were around his ankles to stop them from chafing his bare skin. I was tempted to take a photo, but I reminded myself of where I was (China) and thought better of it. Thinking about it later, it occurred to me that this being China also meant that there was probably a quite good chance that if I'd asked to take a photo they'd have let me. We'd have probably had a group picture with everyone too, me and convict guy included, all smiling happily. But I think playing it safe was the best option; I don't like to push my luck too far.

The x-rays were delayed beyond the promised hour, and so we went back to doctor friend and told him we had somewhere we needed to be and it wasn't a hospital; he dropped everything and went to the radiology department in person and got the pictures. China mostly works on this system: unfairness, and cutting corners if you've got the power to do so. It turned out everything in my chest was where it should be, and we proceeded to jump another couple of queues to get my medication quickly and, thank you for asking, I seem to be a lot better. The photographs of my lungs are on public display in my bathroom. I suppose that's not that public, but you're welcome to drop in and inspect them, should you be passing by. if you're not in the area I'm including them here, and claim to be the only poet on this site to show you some of their inner workings.

“It’s splendid that you’ve rung me up,” she said. “I was just going out to give a Talk on How I Write My Books. Now I can get my secretary to ring up and say I am unavoidably detained.”

“But, Madame, you must not let me prevent—“

“It’s not a case of preventing.” said Mrs. Oliver joyfully. “I’d have made the most awful fool of myself. I mean, what can you say about how you write books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all. It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and then the Talk would have been ended and everyone would have been very fed up. I can’t imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk ab out writing. I should have though it was an author’s business to write, not talk.”

“And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you.”

“You can ask,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but I probably shan’t know the answer. I mean one just sits down and writes. . .”

Yesterday I blogged about judging the Washington Prize. 2011 was The Word Works' first year using an electronic submission method, which resulted in about a fifty percent increase in submissions. Once the decision was finalized by the judges, we learned that we’d chosen work by Mike White, a native of Canada who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah, where he now teaches. Though his poetry has been widely published in literary magazines, this will be White’s first published poetry collection, entitled How to Make a Bird with Two Hands. I asked him to describe his experience with book contests, as well as to talk about his title and aesthetic.

How long had you sent your manuscript out to the contests? About how many contests did you enter? Did you revise the manuscript during the process?

I’ve been sending out the manuscript for about five years, though the current

version of the manuscript scarcely resembles the original. Before winning the

Washington Prize, I probably entered 20-25 different contests, some on multiple

September 06, 2011

I made mention in my first post of the poet Jeremy Twill. He is not very well-known, to be honest, and those of his poems that have seen the light of publishing day were printed in somewhat obscure, pre-internet and now defunct journals. However, there is an interesting interview with him dating from 2004 here and I for one am hoping that he might resume publishing in the time that's left for him. He's not young. (I wanted to include a recent photograph, but Twill is a famously private person, so an artist's impression will have to suffice.)

On occasion he writes to me. He is one of the few people I know who sends real letters, and not emails. A month or so ago he sent me, unbidden, the following. I think it's interesting, but I'm a sucker for poets writing about poetry, even when it's rubbish, or I don't understand them. I reprint his letter, or at least the interesting part of it, verbatim. I think it speaks for itself.

How I wrote "Why It Never Rains Where I Am"

First I thought of the title. Well, I did not exactly think of it, but the title appeared in my mind and almost immediately I realized that it was an excellent title although when it appeared it was just a phrase but, no matter, I tried to remember it until I could find a pencil. I found a pencil and then wrote it down. By this time I had decided it was not merely an excellent title but a grand one: "Why It Never Rains Where I Am".

The first three words of the poem ("complex trees abandoned") arrived (from where I cannot say with any certainty) at around the same time as an urgent, surprising and acute but thankfully short-lived attack of diarrhoea occasioned I think by some untrustworthy seafood. I wrote them down on a napkin, because I am of the generation that does that kind of thing. Uses napkins, I mean.

I did not understand the words. Rather, and let me be more precise: I understood each word but I did not understand why they were together holding hands like three girls in one of those new-fangled and tasteless shopping malls made almost entirely of glass and bad taste. So I left them like that because it seemed literary and "open to interpretation", like Dan Brown's novels. But I prefer to adhere to the basic rules of English grammar so I put them into what I judged (and still judge) to be a sentence: Complex trees abandoned.

With this much under my belt the time had come to decide if this was going to be a long poem or a short poem, one of my more obscure offerings or anecdotal, ambiguous or, heaven forbid, popular. I have to admit that decisions of this nature are usually determined by the state of my life at the time: for example, if I am happy or sad, bored or non-committal, having frequent sexual activity, or in the middle of my annual "I should read The Bible" period. As it happened I had recently brought to a close a pleasant but meaningless period of solitude (I had rented a dilapidated, nay ruined, hut in a tiny village almost in the middle of nowhere but within earshot of USAF (why are they still here, by the way?) planes taking off and landing, to write (but I did not)) and taken a temporary part-time job as a delivery boy (quite an old boy! but that was what I was called) for our local what you would now call I suppose "convenience store", but in those days it was just a simple grocer shop. This perhaps explains the next line of the poem: "I'm threatened. Girl horror, I did not see the knife."

Of course, I had to decide if this line really "worked" with the "Complex trees abandoned." line but those kind of tough decisions are what poets are faced with every day of their seemingly interminable lives. But from this point forward it was easy. The concluding lines were as obvious as (insert simile for the blindingly obvious).

It is quite a short poem (only three lines) and looking back at it now from a long distance I wonder if the title and the first line and the second line and, if I were to be pushed, the last line are at all connected in any meaningful and comprehensible way but I think language is like a fish you cannot keep a hold of and I really think after a few drinks it is possible to see the poem as a self-sufficient object, which is more than can be said most of the time about almost anything. I think if I were given the chance to revise it I might change some of the words, but since it has been published I think it is too late. I hate revisions when they occur so many years after the initial composition, don't you? But "complex" is not quite right, and neither is "tree". And I never really liked "abandoned" either. How can you abandon trees? And the last line ("I called the fictitious doctor messaged into the twilight-light passageway shelter of unbecoming beauty but never quite sad enough to be considered an emergency case circumstance and examined but if and also bird on bough falling into angel territory or maybe that was only in a dream and whether or not rising death rates are all falling in love we are not machines but threatened by annexation and examination of life expectancy how nature tricks and however it is it is is it a rhetorical question") is definitely much too long. I do not know how it came to pass that I did not pick up on that at the time.

Most poets with fewer than three books and a stellar international reputation rely on the book contests in order to get their collections published. This may not be the case in the future, as self-publishing continues to lose its whiff of desperation. The production values available to self-publishers have improved a great deal. At the same time, literary presses both academic and independent are operating with diminishing funds. Still, the contests are alive and well. I thought it might be interesting to BAP blog readers to have a fly’s eye view of the judging of the 2011 Washington Prize, an annual contest for a full length poetry collection awarded by The Word Works, a venerable independent literary press in Washington, DC. I sit on their advisory board.

Instead of hiring a poet to judge the finalists, The Word Works judges the prize by a committee consisting of board members and two invitees, all of whom are poets. This year’s panel, which I sat on, was sent the eleven finalists’ manuscripts about a month before we met in rural New Hampshire at a small artists’ residency called Toad Hall. We were asked to read each manuscript a few times, taking notes as to its strengths and weaknesses, then arranging our top five in descending order. I thought the quality of the finalists’ manuscripts varied wildly— from the unadventurous to the exquisitely polished. I spent the four hour drive to New Hampshire mentally preparing to stave off any potential campaign for one of the manuscripts that were in my bottom four or five. The manuscripts I thought were strongest (there were three) had the following qualities:

Each poem, regardless of its length or position in the manuscript, was strong. There were no filler poems.

There was a balance between the writer’s stylistic strong suits and riskier poems.

It was clear that the manuscript was engaged in conversation with not just earlier poetry but contemporary literature and culture.

I was left with the sense that I knew something about the worldview of the poet or the speaker of the poems.

I speak only for myself (God forbid I should speak for the other apasionados on the jury!) and myself at this time in my career. I think it’s important to remember that even with a jury, there’s an element of chance involved in the selection of a manuscript.

September 05, 2011

I live in China. I came here in 2005, and except for the 2007/8 academic year when I returned to England to take up a Writing Fellowship that had been held open for me I've worked at the same university all that time. I came here as an ESL teacher, but now teach a variety of subjects, including literature courses. One day back at the beginning of 2005 I received two emails: one was from my youngest son, who was then in Costa Rica having a good time, and another was from a friend who was in China teaching English and also having a good time. I was in England, comfortable enough, but suddenly I felt like I was missing out on something that had to do with it's a big world out there; six months later I was here. What I knew about China at that point you could've comfortably etched on to a fingernail.

I'm not going to try and explain what it's like here. The first time I returned to England and everyone was asking me to describe what China was like I realized I couldn't do it. You can show the photos, tell the anecdotes, but something is always missing: the words "it's a different culture" don’t go anywhere near it. No matter how many times I say the people are wonderful, friendly and open, that the students are a delight to teach, that invitations to their homes to see their town and meet the family are endless, and how not everyone eats rice all the time …. to be honest, after six years I'm kind of bored even mentioning those things, because this is where I live now and it's all normal.

What is pretty true, though, is that most "foreigners" (by which I mean Westerners) living here for any substantial length of time probably should own up to a certain sense that they're escaping something, albeit in differing degrees. Many, particularly younger people, come here for "the experience", for sure, but even then it can easily become more than that. Foreign teachers especially enjoy a fairly privileged existence. Usually paid quite well by Chinese standards, and therefore having more than enough disposable income, they also benefit from the reverence the Chinese have for "the teacher".

But it's a bubble, and an escapist bubble at that. Some measure of guilt comes from living comfortably in a place where there are very serious issues, but we're 99.9 per cent unaffected by them, and we're also half a world away, literally, from problems at home, wherever home may be. We're privileged: you can't really claim that not being able to use Youtube and Facebook constitute major incursions into the quality of life, even though you know there's an important principle involved. And anyway, you can get those things if you really want them. The technology exists. When I read in the English papers that phrase "internet censorship in China" I can't help but almost smile: I'm not denying curbs on freedom exist here, nor the horrors that undoubtedly go along with that; all I'm saying is that the general everyday reality is somewhat different from what that hackneyed journalist phrase suggests. When the furore over the Nobel Peace Prize and Liu Xiaobo erupted, it didn’t make the Chinese TV news, or the newspapers, but in class one day I saw a student reading a photocopy of the story in The Economist.

All this is far from simple, and I've probably already upset a whole bunch of people who live a long way away and know more about human rights and being liberal than I do.

On a slightly different tack, one of the most disturbing issues I've come across is one that affects lots of young people here: China is a country where Confucian philosophy and "tradition" is still very strong and influential – it's "part of the culture" – and one aspect of that is of course the importance of family. So many young people here are faced with a problem largely beyond the western experience: brought up to respect family values and obligations, they find themselves studying and sitting endless exams to get a good job (that probably isn’t there) to earn money so they can one day both repay (literally, in some cases: with money) their parents for what they've been given but also care for them in their old age in a way that certainly doesn’t happen in my country. If you're thinking "Well, we care about our parents too….." believe me, this is a whole different ball-game.

It's perfectly normal here for young people to be faced with a future that involves a marriage more or less arranged by their parents, having children, and then eventually living with aged parents, and pretty much putting them first in ways that would have been and still are frankly impossible for me, as a Westerner, someone who left home at 19, to comprehend. For many young people here that poses no major issues, because this is what happens, it's what life is. But for many others it tears them apart, because while they've been raised with those expectations all their lives and will continue to live with them, they've also learned "western" independence and the desire to move away and do not what their parents and "society" expect, but what they need as free-thinking people. Western culture is a big part of their lives, and this is "modern China". But in very significant ways it's still old China. One girl I know – I say girl, but she's a woman of 24, a graduate, and very smart, with excellent English – seriously feels like she's living a life and is destined to for ever have a life she doesn’t want, a Chinese life lived for other people, not for herself. She's told me she feels doomed. Her parents wheel out prospective husbands on a regular basis, and I know her well enough to know she wasn't exaggerating how she feels. And I know other bright and intelligent young Chinese who are desperate (and when I say desperate, I mean desperate:) at having to make a choice that in reality is no choice at all: the parents always win.

September 04, 2011

I thought you might like to know all the latest poetry news, gossip, scandal and theoretical debates from British Poetry World. And I'm particularly well-placed to fill you in on all of this because I live in China. Oh, I wrote that wrong. It should be ill-placed, I think.

But the internet is a marvellous and indispensible monster, and when I feel inclined I can have a look at British Poetry World from a safe distance and it's almost like being back in England, apart from the red buses, the rain and umbrellas and bowler hats, an occasional Royal Wedding, and endemic obesity. Oh, and a riot every now and then. Actually, where I am in China has plenty of rain this time of year, thank you very much, albeit carting it ("carting it" being an expression, in relation to rainfall, I picked up only recently) in temperatures of 30 plus. I love these sub-tropical storms. I want to put one in a poem but I haven't done it yet; I've only been here six years. We don't have riots here, as far as I know; if they happen they sure as hell aren't reported.

Anyway, as for British poetry, I know very little about it these days, except that as usual a lot of what I see is pretty good if you're having trouble sleeping. But new stuff, and "trends" or the like, are as difficult to keep pace with as new music, and I gave up trying to keep up a long time ago. In the mainstream, whatever that is, the other day I read that Simon Armitage "stands head and shoulders above the rest of his generation". It immediately struck me that this is the kind of nonsense life is full of. It's just not true. Armitage is no taller than your average poet, even when he's wearing his trademark platform shoes.

This led me to thinking how so much of what happens in life is imaginary. Really, it is. For instance, I must have imagined how in response to the recent riots in England (England, not "Britain", or "the U.K.") the poet laureate wrote and published a poem you can find here:

Seriously, please tell me I'm imagining that.

An occasional friend or acquaintance (I can never decide which noun is the more accurate), the poet Jeremy Twill, also wrote a poem about the riots but it remains unpublished, as does the majority (if not quite all) of his work. My favourite lines from the poem are:

The little fluffy kittens playing with their balls of wool, they're still lovely, aren't they?

This, perhaps, is the essence of "the English" (who apparently invented irony). They're not so much appalled by what's being destroyed on the television as comforted by the continuing existence of fluffy kittens, come what may, and the freedom to have them. Riots may come and go, but fluffy kittens are a constant. (Another friend has pointed out to me that fluffy kittens grow up and turn into cats that rip innocent birds to shreds. I think he's missing my point, unless it's that I'm missing his.) The first words of Twill's poem (which, before you ask, he has insisted I don't print in full because he's "still working on it") are "I'm not surprised, so why is everybody else?" Here speaks a poet of the real world, someone who has walked through an almost deserted English city centre early on a quiet and sunshiny Sunday evening and been subjected to indiscriminate verbal abuse and threatened with physical violence by examples of English so-called manhood and, I hate to say it but it's true, womanhood. It's an experience that makes one think seriously about fluffy kittens, and what they mean.

In my next post, I'm planning to write about how it's apparently okay to leave your home country and go live inside an escapist bubble in another country – and preferably another country with even bigger political and social problems than the one you're fleeing.

This week we welcome Martin Stannard as our guest blogger. Martin is a poet and critic from England. He was editor of the magazine joe soap's canoe from 1978 to 1991, and was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, 2007-8. After a couple of decades ekeing out a living as a poet visiting schools, leading workshops, and doing (very) occasional readings (including at St. Marks and the KGB Bar in New York City) he moved to China, where he teaches English and other humanities subjects at Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Faith (Shadowtrain Books, 2009) and How To Live A Life: Selected Uncollected Poems 2002-2009 (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). Two collections of his reviews, critical essays and occasional writings have also been published: Conversations with Myself (Stride, 1999) and Respondings (Argotist Ebooks, 2011). He has collaborated with English printmaker Dale Devereux Barker on two art/poetry books, and with poet Mark Halliday on a series of short plays, a few of which have appeared in print in The Indiana Review, The Colorado Review and some other journals not all of which have the word "Review" in the title. He and Halliday are embarking, even as we speak, on a set of collaborative stories, the first of which is currently just 5 sentences long, but destined to be longer. Much longer. His homepage can be found here, but it's somewhat out-of-date since Typepad became one of several blogging systems unusable in China, so he stopped paying for it. A new martinstannard.com site is in the pipeline, but it seems to be a very long pipeline, and patience is recommended.

Welcome, Martin.

In other news . . .

Save the Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011 - The Best American Poetry 2011 Launch Reading. 7 PM, Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street, NYC) Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Kevin Young will be joined by John Ashbery, Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer Knox,Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, and Lee Upton.